The Shoe (Bomb) on the Other Foot

Poor Porter Goss. First, the longtime Florida congressman leaves his safe seat to become director of the CIA, only to find that he's been neutered by a new bureaucratic setup where he reports to John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence. Then he writes an op-ed piece decrying intelligence leaks in The New York Times on Friday, the exact same day as a story appears identifying today's biggest leaker of antiterrorism secrets in Washington--President George W. Bush.

For crass political reasons--namely to advance his position on the National Security Agency spying story--the president chose to use a speech to the National Guard Association to disclose details of a 2002 “shoe bomb” plot to blow up the U.S. Bank Tower, the tallest building in Los Angeles. While the plot had been revealed in general terms in the past, the White House this week arranged for Bush's counterterrorism adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend, to explain to reporters in a conference call exactly the kind of details that Goss claimed on the op-ed page helped the enemy. “We are at risk of losing a key battle,” Goss wrote. “The battle to protect our classification system.”

That system is at particular risk when it is exploited for political purposes. The president is allowed to declassify whatever he wants; that's one of the privileges of being president. So in this case--unlike the NSA's warrantless eavesdropping--there is no issue of Bush breaking the law. But let's be clear on what this was: a deliberate effort to use declassification for partisan purposes, in this case, defending the administration's policy on NSA surveillance, which Karl Rove says publicly will be a big part of the 2006 midterm campaign.

The White House made perfect political use of the twilight zone of intelligence. While Townsend did not explicitly claim that the NSA surveillance program had foiled the Los Angeles plot, she tried to imply that it might have played a role. “We use all available sources and methods in the intelligence community but we have to protect them,” she told reporters. “So I'm not going to talk about what ones we did or didn't use in this particular case.”

Let's get this straight. The president and administration officials will suddenly talk about details of the foiled plot--details that were highly classified until now. But they won't say if the controversial NSA program was involved. Given their new willingness to talk at length about the case, can anyone seriously doubt that had the NSA eavesdropping cracked this case, they would have mentioned that? Simply saying that the NSA helped foil the plot--if it had--would not have compromised “sources and methods.” You can bet that if this were an NSA case, we'd know it.

The chronology of Bush's politicizing of intelligence goes something like this: First, the president discloses classified information without any good reason to do so. Why now? It's not as if Los Angeles is hosting the Olympics or under some new threat. (To understand how hurried and political this disclosure was, consider the fact that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat, wasn't briefed on the foiled plot and has been stiffed in his efforts to meet with the president about homeland security in his city, a problem that New York CityMayor Michael Bloomberg and other Republican mayors do not have). Then, by implying without stating that the NSA may have been involved, the White House uses sensitivity about classified information as a shield against finding out whether the NSA is relevant to the Los Angeles plot in the first place.